Hi! How are you doing? Justin here.
In this lesson today, we're gonna be checking out slash chords.
Now, slash chords have nothing to do with Slash from Guns 'n' Roses
before you get a little excited
and think we're gonna learn Sweet Child O'Mine.
Slash chords also,
sometimes confused as being two chords at the same time.
You often see stuff like D/F#.
It's amazing how many guitar players just freak out and go:
"Oh, I can't play it, it's two chords at once,
I don't know how to do that."
But it's actually really, really, really, simple.
All it is, is a chord, "/" and then a base note.
So if you see D/F#,
it means a D chord with an F# note in the bass.
It's actually pretty simple.
And the coolest thing about it is,
if you ever see a slash chord,
and you don't know the whole slash chord,
or you've never played it before, you can't work it out immediately,
just play the chord, the first part.
Ignore the slash and what's after the slash 'cause if you're playing in a band,
probably the bass player is gonna be playing that bass note anyway.
So you don't really have to do it.
On guitar it kinda sounds interesting sometimes
to be using a different bass note,
so that's why they exist on their purpose.
Now, what I'm going to take you through is three of the most common slash chords.
We're gonna do a nice little close-up now,
and I'll run through, not just the chords, but
how they're most often used.
Here we go, here's the first chord
that I'm going to show you,
which is a D with an F# bass.
Sounds like this:
. . .
and I know what you're thinking,
you're thinking: "Oh, It's just like a regular D". But...
actually, my thumb is playing this note here:
this F#. (Plays)
Now, for many of you doing the thumb-over technique,
it's gonna be a little bit difficult.
So, I'm gonna show you some alternatives,
but this is my personal preference most of the time,
from playing D with an F# bass,
is to use my thumb on that bass note.
Now, the other alternatives...
If you think, there's your regular D chord.
If you move your thumb over to play the bass note,
and move each finger around,
so you still got a regular sounding D,
and you move your 1st finger over.
That's another pretty decent way of playing a D with an F# bass.
. . .
The only problem with this one is it's a bit difficult to use in context.
Now, the context is usually G,
. . .
D with an F# bass,
. . .
Em.
. . .
'Cause that way you get this.
. . .
So you can see, there is where we're using big G.
. . .
Now we got that 3rd finger anchored, thumb comes over.
. . .
And even, you can leave that 3rd finger down
and play the Em7 if you wanna be really clever.
. . .
But here's another way of doing it, which is very common.
So, playing G,
. . .
D with an F#, so
first finger, muted the A string,
Open, 2nd finger, 3rd finger.
Now, very often,
the open E rings out as well.
Now, it shouldn't 'cause that really makes it
kind of a Dadd9 chord over F#,
or something complicated like that.
It doesn't really matter.
It's just a D over F#,
you accidentally hit the open string
and it sounds cool.
. . .
So, the only other way, sometimes,
it's played like that.
Now, I don't tend to play it that way a whole lot,
but you can use: 2nd finger, muted the A string,
open string, 3rd finger, 4th finger and the open E string,
or mute the E string,
with the outside of your little finger.
You can choose with that one.
So, it's a very common chord there to go between G,
. . .
D with an F# bass,
. . .
and Em.
. . .
OK, the next one I'm gonna show you,
is this chord here, this is G with a B bass.
Now, this one normally goes between Am and C.
So if we have C, G with a B bass, Am.
. . .
You can hear you get:
. . .
And again, there's a few options for playing this one.
You can think of it like... there's a regular G.
If we just don't play that thickest string,
. . .
we've got there a G with a B bass.
But as we know already,
there's a few different ways of playing G.
And the two methods I prefer, either:
2nd finger on the 2nd fret of the 5th string, little finger on the 3rd fret of the 2nd string,
. . .
and then the thinnest string is muted.
Sometimes, (plays)
I let the open E string ring out on this one as well,
which you shouldn't,
it's not part of the chord, but it sounds nice.
And remember, if it sounds good, it is good.
Little finger also can move down onto the thinnest string.
. . .
That's also a nice G with a B bass.
. . .
And leave it there for the Am until we get an Am7.
. . .
Very cool little sequence.
So, there's your couple of variations for G with a B bass.
Now, the last one I wanna show you,
this is a bit old-school. (Plays)
And this is a C chord,
but we're adding a G in the bass.
So all we're doing is moving our 3rd finger over,
and whacking our little finger down.
. . .
And there we have a C/G.
. . .
I like this one 'cause it got a really fat, warm sound.
In fact, you can often substitute this one.
It just says C, you can play this chord instead.
Really sounds pretty cool I reckon, so
Regular C, move that over, little finger goes down,
there's your C/G.
Now the important thing to remember with slash chords
is you can kind of just make them up.
You can have any chord with any bass note.
So, just some examples that I can give you really quickly:
here's an Am chord:
. . .
If we put down our little finger here,
. . .
we could have Am/C,
Am with a C bass 'cause that note there is C.
Or (plays) Am with a G bass.
. . .
Because that there note (plays)
That there, that there'd be G, that note there.
And then we could have, say, Am with an F# bass,
so we just have to refinger the Am,
so let's do a regular Am, but then
. . .
we'd have there, an Am with an F# bass,
also known as F#m7b5, if you wanna impress your friends.
. . .
And, back to Am.
You can really have anything at all.
You can have an A chord with a C# bass.
You can have an A chord with a D bass, if you wanna really stretch yourself.
. . .
You can make up anything.
And that's the cool thing with these slash chords.
You can literally make up any one, and people do,
and that's how they get pretty cool sounding chords.
Comes from piano players 'cause they separate their hands.
They have one hand playing bass,
and one hand playing chords.
So it's very easy for them to swap the bass note around.
It's a little bit harder for us to do,
but it sounds really effective.
So, have fun with these slash chords,
give them a little bit of practice,
practice combining them as well,
doing the G, D with an F# bass, to Em,
and the C, G with a B bass, to Am.
That's definitively one of the key things to practice,
linking those other two chords.
There are some exercise on the website,
go check'em out, have fun,
and I'll see you for an another lesson very soon.